Powerscourt Estate

A country estate of nineteen hectares in Enniskerry, famous for its house and its landscaped gardens. The house began as a thirteenth-century castle and was extensively rebuilt by the German architect Richard Cassels between 1731 and 1741. Fire gutted it in 1974 and it stood as a shell until 1996. The land came to the Wingfields by a long and ugly manoeuvre: they murdered Phelim O’Toole near Powerscourt on 14 May 1603, and James I granted Sir Richard Wingfield a twenty-one-year lease of the manor that October for £6 Irish and a knight’s fee.